Last update - 00:00 16/02/2007
Maccabi Tel Aviv winning streak ends with 11-point defeat to Tau Vitoria
By Haaretz Sports Staff
Maccabi Tel Aviv's 15-game winning streak at the Yad Eliahu arena came to a screeching halt Thursday night, when the perennial Israeli champion was humbled 88-79 by Tau Vitoria in the Euroleague's Top 16.
After failing to impress in the first stage of the Euroleague, ending with eight wins and six losses, Maccabi got its second-round games off to the worst possible start. The home team suffered from inconsistency throughout Thursday night's game and Tau began the game strongly. Igor Rakocevic scored 16 of his game-high 19 points in the first quarter as Tau surged ahead. Strong minutes from Nikola Vujcic and Lior Eliyahu led Maccabi back in the second half, but Serkan Erdogan caught fire down the stretch and Rakocevic killed the game with a clutch triple to give Tau a tough road win.
The visitors were playing without head coach Velimir Perasovic, who was hospitalized this week with chest pains. Assistant coach Natxo Lezcano picked up the win in his first game on the sidelines. Erdogan finished with 14 and Tiago Splitter came off the bench for 12. Tau's star power forward Luis Scola suffered from foul trouble and was held to 8 points in 21 minutes. Eliyahu led Maccabi with 17, Tal Burstein added 13 and Vujcic flirted with a triple double, posting 12 points, 10 rebounds and 8 assists. After the game, Maccabi coach Neven Spahija said he would go back to the drawing board to analyze what went wrong. "It's not just up to me," he said. "It depends on the game and the momentum of the play. I will be talking to the coaching staff and the players about what happened here tonight."
Tau's stand-in coach, while delighted with the result, was not happy with the style his players adopted.
"We scored a lot of points in the first quarter," he told the Euroleague Web site, "but it's not the way we wanted to play. In the second quarter we played better defense but we didn't score well. We knew that had we allowed an offensive-style game with 100 points, we would have probably lost."